We host our own sites and I *AM* a programmer. It's just that I have not messed with this Magento convoluted piece of crap before. I have experience with Prestashop.

The situation is like this. We are going to offer some affiliates to have a shop of their own on our site using a subdomain. We will style the sites according to their sites and it will look like their users are still on their site even though they are on our subdomain.

We are needing info on how to setup Magento like that where it does not screwed up our default site because the original developer did not make a copy of the default site before making mods to it. It is still called default. How can we safely make a copy and rename it then restore the default store easily?

Now you will notice in the article you should have just read that the themes have a directory for template files and a directory for css,images, ect. Please note that below are the default locations.
A) app/design/frontend/default/default/
B) skin/frontend/default/default/

What you need to do is move your current theme folders into a new directory.
A) app/design/frontend/YOURPACKAGE/default
B) skin/frontend/YOURPACKAGE/default

Now you need to set the config setting in the admin to use this new theme for you current store.
Go to Admin -> system -> configuration -> design. This is where themes are managed.
Under the package fieldset change the "Current Package Name" to the value of "YOURPACKAGE". Next make sure that under the "Themes" fieldset the "Default" field is set to "default". Clear out any other values in the Themes fieldset.

Now you site should be pulling the theme from the new directories.

Now to restore the original default themes. Download the same version of Magento and replace/merge
app/design/frontend and skin/frontend with what is in the download of magento. The theme you just created will not be overridded b/c it is in a new folder that does not exist in Magento.

Then vola. You have your custom theme in its own folder and you have restored the original default theme.

On a side note: Magento is a nice package. It just takes a little time to get use to the conventions used. In order to use it properly and to make things easier on yourself you need to read and learn about magento then implement any changes you need. A background knowledge of Zend Framework also helps out.

Thanks. I am severely searching for a replacement for Magento. We only use the cart and one page checkout portions, we don't actually use anything else in Magento. The site is ExpressionEngine-based and we list all our products using EE. When we want to "add something to the cart" we use Magento code to add the item to the cart and show the cart. Then we use One-Page checkout for the checkout stuff with the PayPal module. We use UPS and USPS shipping modules, too.

Magento is way to complicated for the use it has been tasked to do on this site. The contractors that did this site knew neither EE or Magento and the results show that they didn't. Implied expertise was certainly missing in this instance.

We sell seats to education courses as well as publications so the product lines are not typical Magento fare. We also allow users to register other people for the courses so it had to be setup kind of weird. The way they handled that was to use a voucher object and add each participant to the voucher when they were added. The voucher object is parsed at checkout and passed to our backend via webservice.

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